12 July 2009

Seeking software developer guinea pigs for on-line project management

If you are interested in finding a way to manage your software development projects, helping improve communications, efficiency, and timeliness, please write intranetsites@surkan.com to enquire about being a beta tester for a new end-to-end on-line project management tool. This software has already proven itself as a great help to one small distributed web software development team (with team members in places as diverse as the Philippines, Canada, and Russia).

Track entire projects, including e-mails, customer requirements, and specifications from the beginning to end of project. Everyone on the project stays on the same page.

Complete versioning and history on every document in the system (can easily revert back to whatever previous version you wish).

Handle project and task management, automatically determined delivery dates and assigning tasks to the appropriate people. It is easy to tell when things are falling behind (and automatically re-adjusting schedules in real-time) before they get out of hand.

Automatic costing, easily showing how much a project will cost (with labour, materials, etc) and the profit margins.

Completely web-based architecture doesn’t require any local software, and can be easily used by an team-members wherever they are in the world.

Serves as core of your own public web site, allowing you to automatically turn any document into public web pages.

Granular permissions allowing administrator to define how much, or little, of system each individual participant can access.

There would be no charge for using this software for at least 6 months from first registration. Future prices for beta testers will be capped at nothing more than the cost of hosting the servers for a year after the first 6 month trial (e.g. if you setup a web site that has huge amounts of traffic and downloads your costs will rise accordingly). To give some perspective, this software has already been licensed to some small manufacturers for upwards of $40,000 a year. Being able to use this for free is a steal.

The prime motivation for making this offer is to because we want to move into the software development market. We expect our beta users to put some effort into creating project template definitions defining the standard tasks in their development process, which we can then use to create a generic turn-key solution for future customers. Just imagine that we are giving you some spreadsheet software, but want you to create a detailed spreadsheet template that can be used by others who want to do similar things.

In the interests of full disclosure, the UI is rough around the edges right now, and wouldn’t be appropriate for rank technology novices (for doing the actual setup and definition of the projects that are being managed, day-to-day usage could be handled by many people). This software works best for small organizations with less than 200 developers or testers. You can check out more details of the features of this product, and watch a demonstration video.